


Walk With Me, Suzy Lee

by thatdamneddame



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Human, Bromance, F/M, Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-12
Updated: 2013-10-12
Packaged: 2017-12-29 03:55:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1000578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatdamneddame/pseuds/thatdamneddame
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean meets Charlie in college and there is no reason for them to be friends. Or Five Time Dean and Charlie Were the Best of Friends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Walk With Me, Suzy Lee

**Author's Note:**

> Did you know that when you fly from Australia to LA that you can watch episodes of Supernatural on the plane? Pro tip: Don't do this. The dude sitting next to you will judge you when you start to have feelings. Obviously I ignored my own advice. Combine that with two hours of sleep and a six hour layover and you have this. Friendship fic because I want everything not to hurt so bad.
> 
> Thanks to prettyasadiagram for the customary beta, hand-holding, and mockery. I look forward to you reminding me about this for many, many years.
> 
> Title comes from "We're Going To Be Friends" by The White Stripes.

**5\. Year One**

They meet in college and there is no reason for them to be friends. Well, they meet when Sam’s in college, living with Dean in his apartment because it’s cheaper than paying room and board on top of tuition, but there is still no reason for them to be friends. Except that Dean crashes one of Sam’s lame study-party things and Charlie is there, surfing the net and rolling her eyes whenever Sammy or one of his buddies says something hopelessly nerdy.

“I take it you’re not the study buddy type, then,” Dean says, sitting down next to her. Sam has scolded him, in the past, on being _polite_ and _sociable_ or some shit. Whatever. Dean’s plenty sociable.

“No.” The girl shrugs, uninterested in Dean in a way most girls aren’t. Her eyes barely flicker towards him and she never takes a second glance, never lingers over his eyes, his shoulders, his arms, things he knows women like on him. Instead she’s looking at her computer. She’s on some site that Dean doesn’t understand, but Dean doesn’t really understand computers all that much anyways. “I’m just TA’ing so Professor Mulligan forgets about me hacking his gradebook maybe a little.” She laughs, nervous but not shy. “You here to learn about Excel spreadsheets too? Because you’re kind of late, dude.”

At this point Sam wanders over from where he was squabbling with overcaffeinated nerds a table over. “Dean. I thought you were at work.”

Dean practically raised Sam, and even if he hadn’t they grew up in each other’s pockets Dean has always been a little too perceptive for someone as big as a dick as him, so it’s easy to hear what Sam’s not saying: _Don’t embarass me in front of my nerd friends_. “Switched shifts. I’m doing Ramirez a solid.”

“Well, we’re going to be here for a while,” Sam tells him, the _so please leave_ is obvious.

Dean smiles placidly, comfortable in his role as big brother. “That’s cool. I’ll just hang out over here. I don’t want to embarrass you or anything in front of your friends, since I, you know, forgot to wear my pocket protector and suspenders today.”

Sam leaves in a huff of frustration and hair, and Charlie doesn’t quite manage to wait until he’s back sitting at his table before laughing. “Big brother, huh?” she asks, actually looking at Dean instead of her computer.

“Embarrassing him is one of the perks.”

Charlie smiles and Dean smiles back and he’s never really had a proper friend before—grew up with Sammy and Jo, and Dean has always known that family was more than just blood. “I’m Charlie, by the way.”

Dean reaches out to shake her hand and that is kind of that.

 

**4\. Year Three**

“You know, you could just stop sleeping with everyone on two legs,” Charlie not so helpfully points out as Dean tries to figure out the space age coffee pot Sam bought him as some sort of cruel gift.

“How many times am I going to have to tell you I’m fine before you actually believe it?” Dean asks, hitting some magic combination of buttons that makes the machine start to hiss. Dean likes sex, so what. He doesn’t know why Charlie is always at his house after ill-advised one night stands dispensing advice.

Charlie shrugs. “Maybe when you actually _are_ fine.” She shoves a piece of toast in her mouth and then hits a few keys on her laptop—posting to a message board or emailing one of the guys from the LARPing group she just joined or hacking into the US Treasury, probably.

“You’re starting to sound like Sam,” Dean accuses, since he knows that his knee-jerk response of _I’m not a girl_ will just end up getting his ass kicked by some five foot five, hundred and twenty pound girl. The first time Sam came home to find Charlie sitting on Dean, he just laughed and took a picture. Now he doesn’t even bat an eye. You teach a kid how to drive a car, and that’s the thanks you get.

The coffee pot makes some terrible noise that either means that the coffee’s ready or that Dean has once again managed produced a substance that would be coffee if it didn’t taste like battery acid. It gives Dean a reason to ignore Charlie and swear, though, so he takes it, taking too big of a sip and burning his tongue so badly he can’t taste anything.

“I mean, I like the ladies too, you know,” Charlie continues when she knows Dean’s sufficiently distracted, “and I’m not opposed to the occasional fling.” Dean does the gentlemanly thing and doesn’t bring up the chain of events that got them booted from that Ren Faire after Charlie started making doe eyes at the Fairy Queen. “But you’re really more the marrying type.”

Dean glares at Charlie over his coffee cup. “You know, you could just leave.”

Charlie just smiles at him winningly. “It’s okay, Dean. One day your prince will come.”

 

**3\. Year Six**

Dean works as a paramedic and Charlie does IT at some fancy company and they get together on the weekends to take turns drinking too much on Dean’s back deck or hanging out with Charlie’s LARPing friends. Dean’s not into that nerdy crap, but he grew up on bad television and you can’t honestly think there’s nothing badass about a battle axe.

“I’m not saying one is clearly _superior_ to the other,” Charlie argues one afternoon. “I mean, they’re completely different—content, mythos, morals—but you just can’t tell me that you’d still rather watch ‘save the whales’ than ‘Luke, I am your father.’”

“And you call me the nerd,” Sam says, aggrieved, when he finds them on the back deck, making their way through a six pack of Yuengling.

“You can just move out, Sam,” Dean tells him, the same thing he’s been telling him ever since he graduated Stanford two years ago, before turning back to Charlie. “What, next you’re going to tell me Leia is better than Uhura?”

Charlie shrugs. “If the metal bikini fits.”

“Okay, no. Just no.” Dean stands, ignoring Sam’s dramatic eye roll. Sam doesn’t get to judge Dean’s taste in movies when he insists on having such terrible sideburns. “We are going to settle this like men. With Google.”

Which is how they end up watching _Star Wars XXX_ on the futon Dean’s had since Sam was still a snot-nosed teenager and Dad was still alive. It doesn’t even rank in the top five strangest things they’ve ever done.

  


(Nerd time is for Charlie and Charlie alone. Besides, _The Hobbit_ is awesome. Led Zepplin even wrote a song about it.)

 

**2\. Year Eight**

Dean does not tell Charlie about Castiel. At least, not right away. To be fair, he doesn’t even tell Sam right away, but that’s because Cas has these big blue eyes and doesn’t know anything about cars or sports and he looks at Dean like he matters. And Dean doesn’t really know what to do about that.

Sam lives with Dean, though—refuses to move out because law school is expensive and as long as Sam buys groceries and doesn’t forget the pie, Dean doesn’t charge him rent—so of course he figures it out and of course he’s friends with Charlie and a goddamn teenage girl on top of all of that. Which is why, of course, Dean comes back from a long shift to find Sam and Charlie in his kitchen eating like they’re in a fraternity and gossiping about him.

“Honest to God,” Sam lies blithely. “He was blushing.”

“Quit it, Sammy,” Dean warns. “I’ll tell her about all that poetry you wrote for Jess.” Sam had an artistic phase freshman year. It was unfortunate for everyone involved. Sam blanches as Charlie neatly course corrects from Dean’s lovelife to Sam’s poor life choices.

But later, when Sam is busy stressing about some lawyer thing that he’s going to ace anyways, Charlie tells Dean, “He sounds dreamy.” And Dean knows Charlie well enough to know that she’s being serious, because Charlie does not describe people as being dreamy ironically.

“He’s a nerdy emergency physician who doesn’t even own a tv,” Dean tells her, tone dismissive because Dean doesn’t like to talk about this shit. His early life was a sob story—dead mother and a dad that didn’t know how to raise two kids, not the worst childhood by any means but nowhere near what Dean knows he could have had if his mother had lived—and it’s made him protective of what he has. He used to crash Sam’s lame study parties all the time, just wanting to know what his little brother got up to. In high school he would sneak into his dad’s room and put on his leather jacket, the same one that’s now hanging up in Dean’s closet. Dean has one night stands because it’s easier than admitting that he has feelings.

But of course Charlie knows all this because she is scary smart when she wants to be, and of course the only girl currently in Dean’s life is the only one who can make Dean talk about his feelings without feeling like he’s in a Nicholas Sparks movie.

“Well has he at least seen _Star Trek_?” Charlie asks. Sam had asked if Dean was in love.

And Dean laughs, because it’s the damndest thing. “No. No he hasn’t.”

Charlie smiles. “Must be pretty dreamy then.”

Dean just shrugs. She’s not wrong.

 

**1\. Year Fifteen**

“You know,” says Charlie, “I never really thought we’d end up here.”                                                                                                                                                                                             

“Really?” Dean asks. Charlie is playing footsie with the Queen of England under the table and Dean has the sinking suspicion that this day is going to go like a lot of other terrible days, because Dean lives badly. “Because I think we’ve been here a lot.”

“Not like that,” Charlie says, rolling her eyes.

“Good, because if you don’t quit it with Her Highness over there, I think we’re gonna have a repeat of when you hooked up with Maid Marian and Robin Hood took it personal.” Charlie clears her throat and shifts uncomfortably in her seat. She does, however, quit batting her eyelashes at Fake Elizabeth, which is good because he is too old to be getting kicked out of Ren Faires just because Charlie is apparently weird nerdy lesbian catnip.

“I meant that we’d be _here_ ,” she goes on, ignoring the queen’s frown with aplomb—even in Dean’s most ridiculous playboy days, he has never managed to pull the kind of tail Charlie has— “With Cas over there buying your kids turkey legs and those little bird whistles you hate.”

“What?” Dean demands and spins around in his seat. Sure enough, there’s Sam sword fighting with Daniel while Cas, wearing jeans and an old Johns Hopkins t-shirt and sandals, like a total dweeb, holds Mary’s bird whistle patiently as she attacks a turkey leg like a hungry hyena. “Jesus Christ, those stains are never going to come out.”

Cas, for all he is an excellent doctor and a good husband and surprisingly patient with all of Dean’s assorted bullshit, cannot get out a stain to save his life. Even if Dean hadn’t grown up figuring out how to get grass stains out of Sammy’s jeans because Dad sure as shit wasn’t going to do it, then he would have become a laundry pro anyways with the way Cas lives.

Charlie nudges Dean with her elbow. “Too late now. Don’t worry about it.” She says this like a woman who has clearly never stayed up late on mommy forums, feeling her masculinity fly out the window, trying to figure out how to get barbeque sauce out of corduroy.

“It’s nice, you know,” she adds, just when Dean can start to feel that terrible, sappy smile he always get around Cas start to creep onto his face. “You, me, Cas, Sam, your kids. I did not think we’d end up here.”

“You thought we were going to go to jail for pirating lesbian pornography,” Dean accuses. Charlie just shrugs. Dean’s not wrong; Sam went bitchy enough his senior year of undergrad that it drove them both to drink. And use Charlie’s scary good computer skills for nefarious, devious purposes.

“I’m glad it ended up like this, though.” And Dean would tell her _no chick flick moments_ if he thought it would work. Besides, Charlie’s somehow his best friend and she’s not wrong. “I always said you were the marrying type,” she teases.

And, yeah, Charlie always did say that. Charlie’s always been weird and nerdy and nonjudgemental. She knows most of Dean’s secrets and how to use a broadsword and is probably fluent in Valarin. There is no reason, Dean knows, for them to be friends, but he honestly wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I love you, you know,” Dean tells her, because he is no longer as emotionally stunted as he once was.

Charlie smiles and elbows him again. “I know.”

 


End file.
